Category: Blog-All

April 21st-27th, 2013 is National Infertility Awareness Week and according to the CDC, 6.7 million women under age 44 have impaired fertility. Who knew??? I certainly didn’t! At least not until it happened to me. Looking at me from the outside, having 4 children ranging in from age 5-20, you wouldn’t realize I had any fertility issues unless I told you. After having 3 uneventful pregnancies resulting in 2 sons and a daughter, we thought we were done with having children. Then, when our youngest was 4, we decided that something was missing. We assumed that getting pregnant would be easy- after all, I had already had 3 successful pregnancies. Not-so-much. Of course, I was older now, but even then, I was only 30 at the time which, I think we would all agree, isn’t that old! We tried from almost a year and nothing. Charts, temperatures, healthy lifestyle and still nothing. I couldn’t tell you how many ovulation predictor stick and pregnancy tests I’ve peed on! I could tell you the best brands and how much HCG (the pregnancy hormone) they detected. Then, we decided to see a fertility specialist. I then was diagnosed with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome). At that time, we tried Clomid, IUI and still nothing. Our last effort was to turn to IVF. Of course, I had been doing yoga this whole time and meditating on it and “trying to relax”- yeah right! Tell anyone who says, “just relax and you’ll get pregnant” to take a flying leap! The more you tell yourself to relax, the more anxious you get! Even as a yoga instructor! Oh, and throw in ovaries that are normally the size of grapes that have ballooned to the size of lemons! That makes twisting postures all but impossible! And the hormones- oy vey! The daily shots that I would give myself would make my moods swing like Tarzan in the Amazon and cause me to break out into sweats as if I was doing Sun Salutations in a Bikram Yoga class!